Something Rhymes with Purple - Pocket Monster

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Hello to our poor, powfagged Purple People! Aren’t we tired this week? Whether you’re sitting in digs having just dashed off staged or weary after a hard day at your sexy occupation, we are here for you! And this week we'll be guiding you through the entertaining and esoteric world of… video games! Are you a fan of Space Wars circa 1977, or are you a 7th generation lemming? Are you a speed bump or a snowflake? Are you dying to know what, according to gamers, is the difference between a cow and a sheep? Well never fear, Susie is here to take you through fragging, Fortnite and respawning, while explaining just how silly it is to be salty. Elsewhere Gyles is bamboozled by your Purple Post before sharing a lovely Martyn Hesford poem, reminding us all to "rip the sky open… eat the lilac flower… and breathe". Susies trio: Plothering- chucking it down with rain Woofits- unwell feeling, or a slight moody depression Princock- a foolish and conceited person If you’d like to get in touch with Gyles and Susie then please do! At [e-mail]. Try 6 free issues of The Week magazine worth £23.94 today. Go to http://bit.ly/SomethingRhymeswithPurple and use your special code PURPLE to claim your 6 week free trial today. To buy SRWP mugs and more head to.... https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple A Somethin' Else production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up y'all it's your man Mark Strong Strizzy and your girl Jem the Jem of all Jems and we're hosting Olympic FOMO your essential recap podcast of the 2024 Olympic Games in 20 minutes or less every day we'll be going behind the scenes for all the wins

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with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main We'll see you next time. Annex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to another episode of Something Rhymes with Purple, where Giles Brandreth and I just wax lyrical about the English language and learn quite a lot along the way, I have to say. Hi, Giles.

Hello. It's wonderful to be with you. I've just learned something which I must share with you immediately. And I'm going to share it with you before you throw a bucket of cold water over it. Right. It's this. It's about language. Yeah. You know, when we go on tour, you go to digs, you stay in digs. Yes.

Yes. And people call it a digs list if you have a list of places you go to digs, you stay in digs. Yes. Yes. And people call it a digs list if you have a list of places you go to stay. It's a digs list, all right? You know that, you're familiar with that phrase. I do, and I think I've told you the origin of this before. Yes, and what is it? What do you think it is? Well, I think it goes back to the Californian gold rush,

but also that happened in Australia and it was the diggings around the gold mines and then accommodation was dug up out of the same earth and little shanty towns also grew up but it was the accommodation that got the diggings hence the digs. Well I can tell you that's not true you're wrong you're wrong the world authority the world's greatest lexicographer the girl who knows all the answers apologize for using the word girl I've got a note here saying you're not allowed to use that anymore. We'll come on to that later when we're talking about woke language. from so many TV series, particularly To the Man of Bourne. Anyway, wonderful actor. And he said to me, you keep saying that Diggs is based on diggings. It isn't. And he knows this because he discovered in James Boswell, the friend of Dr. Johnson, an account of an actor who gave another actor a list of places to stay.

The actor was called West, W-E-S-T, that was his first name, Diggs, D-I-G-G-S, West Diggs. And he had a list that he kept. He was a touring actor. This is in the period of Dr. Johnson and James Boswell. He had a list that he kept of places to stay. And the actor was told, oh, if you're looking for someone to stay, Wes Diggs will give you his list. And it then became, it circulated, the Diggs list belonging to the actor Wes Diggs. That predates your gold rush. So what I want you to do, rise to the challenge. Don't answer it now.

Regular listeners will be able, you know, one day in a future episode to hear Susie Dent coming on and either eating humble pie and saying, amazingly, I did look that up. And your story that given to you by Peter Bowles about James Boswell and Dr. Johnson and West Diggs is correct. Or you will say, oh, Giles, you've fallen for another one, some old actor's story. So don't answer it now. Okay. That was one of the things I wanted to say to you. I've got so much I want to say to you. But how are you, first of all? I am, well, I've just been reminded of a word that completely sums me up, actually, on Twitter, which is powfagged or pofagged, depending on where you're from, which is P-O-W, then FAGT, which means incredibly tired. It's an old dialect word for being a real weary head.

So the PO or the POW is a version of poll, as in poll tax or the voting polls. That used to mean a head. And FAGT might be a version of flagging, flagged, just meaning weary. So I'm very, very tired. I had an extremely late night. What do you mean by a late night? 11pm would be a late night for me. What's a late night for you? 4am. You're joking.

No, all in the cause of work, though. What was the work you were doing? Okay, so the work I was doing was recording the comedy version of Countdown called 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, because it's a mash-up of of Countdown called 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown because it's a mash-up of a comedy program called 8 Out of 10 Cats and the program that I normally work on Countdown and we don't finish that well we do two a night and we don't finish till midnight and that is up in Manchester so I came from Manchester back home and finally laid down my tired pole at EF4. So I'm a bit tired and probably not very articulate today. I apologise. This leads me to the next question,

the next thing I wanted to raise with you. I've been collecting things to share with you because we haven't been together for a whole week and I miss you. I particularly missed you when I was week and I miss you. I particularly miss you when I was earlier this week on the River Cam. Oh, yeah. I was on the River Cam on a boat with my friend. Oh, yes, the field series. Yes. We're making a television series about travelling on rivers and canals. We were going along the Cam and this very good looking young man wearing wearing next to nothing, came running out of the Cambridge boathouse, shouting and waving.

My friend Sheila Hancock assumed it was for her. And she said, oh, I like the look of you. And then she realised you couldn't say that sort of thing nowadays. Anyway, waved at this young man who ignored her and came running towards the edge of the water and said, I'm a purple person. I'm a purple person. Give my love to Susie. Oh, do you know, this happened to me just yesterday as well with a lovely security guard at the studios that we were recording in. And he held the door open for me and I said,

thank you very much. And then just as I was, I just cleared one flight of stairs, he called after me and he said, you're welcome. That's nothing compared to the enjoyment of your podcast, which I just thought was lovely. So it does mean something, it really means something, actually, because I had a lighter step as I went up to the fifth floor. Can I say, if you are a purple person listening to this, it really, you can tell from the way we're talking, it really does, we do appreciate it. We are so lucky to have this global coverage. Now, did you think this is what you would end up doing? Because this is the third thing I wanted to raise with you. And did you think that it would be what you might call a sexy occupation, doing what you

do now, when you were a girl? Is it what you wanted to do? I don't think it's at all sexy, but that's possibly because Jimmy Carr, who you know, Giles, who is the presenter of Countdown, but that's possibly because Jimmy Carr, who you know, Giles, who is the presenter of Countdown, constantly reminds me that my books are a form of euthanasia and that essentially I'm the most boring person to listen to in the entire world. That is his, well, it's not his single line of attack. His other one is that I am sexually voracious. And you would think that the two wouldn't necessarily go together,

but he somehow manages to mix those in the jokes that I couldn't possibly repeat here. So, did I imagine that it was sexy? No, I still don't think it is, but I still love it. Well, I'm legitimising asking you that question because I've come across a survey this week. Okay. 2,000 women were surveyed and asked which profession they considered to be the sexiest in 2021. Don't tell me Lexicographer was at the top. No, it wasn't. Oh. It wasn't.

It did feature, though, in the top 50. Seriously? In the top 50. Well, OK, I'll take that. Guess what came at the very top? An engineer. A doctor. Oh, OK, I get that.

Doctors came number one. Yeah. Number two was, with 19% voting for them, bartender. That's not so surprising, I suppose. Doctors, yeah, I understand. Number three, CEO. Number four, with 9%, footballer. Yeah.

8%, footballer. Yeah. 8%, firefighter. Then teacher, builder, personal trainer. I was quite boosted by the next one with just 3%. Politician. Mm-hmm. Cop. 1%. So that means lexicographer 0.00 something percent.

Yes, it was, I'm afraid. It was. Are you serious? It was in the top 50? Yeah. But that was because they provided a list of 50 occupations and it did include lexicographer. So I went straight for that.

The truth is you're almost at the bottom, Susie. Yeah, no, no surprise there. And I'm, I was in there, writer. I called my, well, you're a writer too. Writer comes a bit higher up. Yes, I just fall off my chair. Yes. Well, you've told us you're Paul Fagged. I am.

Anyway, here we are. This is Something Rhymes with Purple with Susie Dent, who is falling off her chair. She's so fatigued. Giles Brandreth, who's in a state of high excitement. And I'll tell you what I wanted to discuss today, if you're up for it. You know, I have a daughter-in-law. Have you met my children? No, I haven't. My children are really sort of your sort of age now because I have grandchildren as well. My son, Bennett, who is a lawyer and an enthusiast and an authority on Shakespearean rhetoric, is married to an actress, or she calls herself an actor, called Kasia Engler.

One of the things that she does is she provides the voices for video games. And she does a great deal of this. And she was chatting to me the other day, and I realised that I couldn't understand her. Partly it's because she's American and speaks very fast. If people want to know, they could hear her voice. She is the voice of Maybelline, which is a cosmetic. So you can really, they do a lot of commercials. So that would be her voice. But she's also on a lot of video games. I'd love that.

How many of them good for the small print? Because it's huge. It is vast, this industry. Two and a half billion people play video games worldwide i'm i'm not one of them are you i mean i have to say i probably wouldn't do them if i was on my own i wouldn't play them if i was on my own but i will happily play mario kart on the nintendo ds i'll play um super mario mario at the olympics so i will very happily play those. We have other games like Roblox on our, basically on various devices in the house. But I wouldn't say we spent hours and hours and hours

gaming. Fortnite, not yet. I'm kind of quite grateful for that, if you know about the Fortnite phenomenon. But again, that's, you know, incredibly addictive. And it's quite interesting. I was talking to the we talk about him a lot because he's one of my heroes David Crystal the linguist talking about the demonstrably worrying gap that's growing in vocabulary between the children who are exposed to a lot of words as they're growing up and those that don't perhaps get sort of immersed in a wide range of vocabulary as they're growing up. And David said something really interesting to me as he said, yes, that is true. But you have

to remember that the kind of traditional tests of a child's vocabulary will be asking them about the kind of the sort of standard curriculum based sets of vocabulary that you will get at school. And he said, if you were to ask a nine or 10 year old to talk about their favourite video game, their vocabulary, their lexicon would be vast. And that's completely true because that is what they are really interested in. So they may not have a huge language to do with, you know, the traditional world around them, but when it comes to the world that they are absolutely immersed in and addicted to, they will be able to talk about it for a very, very long time and very articulately, which I kind of picked up as the impact of these games on our psyche.

Well, I would like you to take me into this world of language, because it's a world I don't know. I was born with the video game in the sense in the 1950s when I was a little boy, there were early computers with games like Bertie the Brain and Nimrod. And they were basically versions of tic-tac-toe, Nim. You know, those old games you used to play with matches put onto a computer. And I think the first recognized video game was in the early 1960s, a game called Space War. And then there was one I know because I love the name. Pong! I do remember that. That was in the early 1960s, a game called Space War. And then there was one I know because I loved the name. Pong!

I do remember that. That was in the 1970s. And that achieved global acclaim. But these are early days of computers. And then we got in, as it all really began to take off, Space Invaders. I do remember. Oh, yes, I remember. Because that was the mid-1970s.

My children were coming along then. Asteroids, 1979. And then Pac-Man. B-A-C-M-A-N, 1980. That's when my children sort of got into it. And then the whole industry collapsed for some reason in the early 80s. And then we had home computers and that began to revive it. And now we've got things I hear about like Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, Tetris. I hear

people talking about this and Fortnite, I know. I was brought up in a totally different world. I know children now are different, you know, and they're playing when they're not taking photographs of their private parts to send to their friends. They are playing these video games and it's an alien world to me so help me into it well it's it's i think the joy of them is that they offer this almost unparalleled opportunity to escape it's all about escapism isn't it it's if you're an adrenaline junkie you can be totally thrilled without the risk we have um the other thing that we do have here which is not quite the same thing is a vr virtual reality headset where you can go on a roller coaster, you can be attacked by dinosaurs, you can jump into a, you know, burning hotel. And that, you can be thrilled without the

risk. But in video games, you know, what if I could score a goal like Messi? What if I could fly like Superman? What if I could go and kill 10 people with no consequences you know and it's that kind of draw alarming isn't it it is very alarming and lots of studies obviously i don't know what the consensus is now actually in terms of the impact of these on real life behavior but i do know it's incredibly tribal when i was writing my book about tribal language and the different languages of different communities it's as tribal a community as you can find. So there are clans who are groups of gamers who play the same competitive game together. There are guilds, they're groups with a kind of objective that they all share.

It's interesting, it's quite influenced by the film industry as as well because there's quite a lot of things going on but you mentioned all the different games that have come about and there are lots and lots of different generations if you like of systems and the console what wars as they were called were people who preferred one company to another. So the seventh generation, I think, was the longest generation in gaming history. And there was a massive competition between the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Mega Drive. And apparently the war between the fans of each of those still rages to this day. And some of them are quite funny. Fans of each of those still rages to this day. And some of them are quite funny.

So PlayStation 3 owners were called cows because they were willing to be milked by Sony for all the accessories. That was the idea. And then Xbox 360 fans were lemmings because they would blindly follow Microsoft to its death. And Nintendo's followers were called sheep who could be led down any path. PC owners were called hermits

because they'd always stay inside. And so it goes on. So it is really interesting that, you know, this is a very, in some ways, it's a very accessible world, but it's also a very closed shop. You know, once you're in it, you belong, I think, very definitely to one clan.

And, you know, I'm not in any of these clans, but I did find the language really interesting. So the companies I've heard of, Nintendo and Sony, these are actually companies, whereas Pokemon and Tetris, they are games. Yes. So Pokemon is short for Pocket Monsters. And Pokemon Go is sort of quite a big thing where you can actually go out and find Pokemon avatars

on different sort of locations. What's an avatar? So an avatar, it's your visual representation, if you like. And it's a really interesting word because it comes from the Sanskrit for the incarnation of a deity, of a god when they descend to Earth. So it's got a really sacred history. But in a game,'s you know you can create who you are who you want to be and that too is a little bit like i guess the filters on snapchat

and instagram and things you can make yourself be the person you want to be and that itself is quite seductive and immersive i think um so nintendo some people think it translates as leave luck to heaven but that is anecdotal possibly apocryphal no one quite knows where that comes from um sony apparently is a mix of sonos meaning sound and sunny as in young lad which the founders of sony considered themselves to be at the time uh sega goes back to service games and so on pac-man's got quite a nice history as well because it was originally called puck man from the japanese word paku meaning to chomp because a pac-man goes around eating lots of dots and they turn into ghosts i can picture i can picture the

pac-man character yeah exactly but of course pac-man or puck man as it was originally called or puck man as it was originally called lends itself quite easily to the change of one letter which would have made it quite rude it would have become fuck man essentially and so they decided to change it to pack man instead and then i mentioned mario and super mario apparently yoshi who i sometimes am if i choose him uh the little green dinosaur that means good luck in japanese which i didn't know and lawrence our brilliant uh producer told me that one but you say you say you are sometimes as characters you have played some of these games have you yeah so i i really like super mario and that kind of thing but honestly i'm my reflexes are so slow whereas i think the gamers today are absolutely incredible

and how they instinctively can go into a new world and know exactly what to do. So I'm a generation too late for this. This is probably why we want younger people flying our aeroplanes for us. Well, I guess that's true. We want neural pathways that are flexible and things zooming along them.

Yeah. We're talking about this partly at the instigation, I think, of an avid esports fan, Jason Tyrant. Great name. Wrote to us from Johannesburg in South Africa, wanting to talk about the tribal world. This coincides, though, with, I think, the Minecraft World Championships. Minecraft is huge. And that's really good as well, because there's a lot of engineering in there where you build things brick by brick.

You have to build these things. Can you design them yourself? Yes, you totally can. What I quite like as well, I just spoke about the criticisms of the violence within games, but there's a distinct kind of morality in gaming as well, because if you are a bitter player who doesn't like losing you're called salty but um the sportsmanship of the world is you can see it in phrases like no johns and no johns i don't know why it means no excuses in other words i'm not going to blame the defeat on anything else this is just my fault and then you know you can type gg for good game at the end of a match which

is like the digital handshake. And if you don't GG an opponent, that's a bit of an insult. It's kind of cocking your nose at your opponent. So I quite like that. There is a kind of tribal etiquette, if you like, within them. And that involves the lingo as well. If you know the lingo, that is a sort of mark of respect. And they're really intense about their language.

So famously, there's a word which is pronounced like own, but it's spelt P-W-N. And it's used in the same sense as own. So to own an opponent, P-W-N, an opponent, is to completely dominate them in online play. And apparently it was a typo for own in a game called Warcraft. But some gamers will tell you it comes from porn in the early days pawn in the early days of the internet when chess was played over message boards but even this will spark this sort of intense conversation and i love that because there's a real sense of caring amongst the gaming community and um there's so i mean so much language that you will find from salty runbacks to fragging to respawning to spacing.

Explain a bit of that. Fragging. What's fragging? Fragging actually, I think, comes from the military. So it's slang for a kill in early shooting games. So I think you'll find that still in use amongst older players, but I know it's still used in the military as well. To respawn, you want your character to respawn if it's died. It's just basically coming back to life. And the defeated player goes back to a specific location, which is called the spawn point.

There is a salty run back. And I mentioned salty. If you're a bit bitter and a bad loser, you're called salty. And a salty run back is a rematch because the defeated player is so bitter about their loss that they want to have another go. A boss is a special class of enemy that's kind of stronger or more important. They're the big bad leaders of all the bad guys. There's a nerf, which is a character that loses strength in a game. A buff is someone with increased strength.

Have you ever played Super Mario, Giles? I think you'd like it. The mushrooms are buffs in Super Mario. I've not played any of these. I've stood in a corner of the room observing my children playing them. And more recently, I've seen my grandchildren fiddling with things like Fortnite,

which I think is for younger ones. Oh, I think it's for older ones, probably. Oh, is it? Well, it's quite violent. Oh, you see, I think probably one of the younger ones said, oh, you needn't worry, Grandpa, it's for young kids, this. You see, it's a language I don't understand. But what you're reassuring me is our mutual friend, David Crystal,

who really does understand about language, is telling you that this hasn't diminished the vocabularies of young people, it's actually expanded them. They still can use all the words that they would have learned anyway at school, the normal words, but they now have got these extra vocabularies on top. Yeah, I mean, I think the internet has certainly expanded vocabulary. So a lot of people have worried that it will mean that English descends into this kind of bland, homogenised language where everybody uses the same simplistic terms. That's definitely not happened. So you can go on the internet and find someone from your tribe, from your group with your own lexicon and you

can chat away, which is brilliant. Not sure completely that you could say that kids all still know the vocabulary from school, because I think there is a legitimate worry in lots of studies done by great people like Oxford University Press, showing that there is a widening gap between kids, as I say, who are immersed in that kind of vocabulary. I mean, there was a big debate about the vocabulary of nature, for example,

and how that's falling out of use. But I think what David was saying is that sometimes if you just shift the focus, you will find that these kids do have a vocabulary. It's just not the traditional one that's been tested. Can you give me a couple of fun words to take away from this conversation? I, before we began talking, now we're going to talk about this today, typed into my computer video games glossary. Oh, yes. And hundreds of pages appeared. The letter A had literally about eight pages of words, none of which made any sense to me at all. I thought, oh, my goodness.

So do you have some favourites that you think could move from the world of video games into general usage? I quite like, it's a bit mean, there's a speed bump. And a speed bump is someone who's easily defeated. So you might say, oh, don't worry about him. He there's a speed bump and a speed bump is someone who's easily defeated so you might say oh don't worry about him he's just a speed bump in other words he's not you just have to stop go a bit slowly and then you'll be on your way um another one i quite like because this is this has become such a pejorative term snowflake um you know that that it's been used as a real um weapon against people who are apparently lefty, liberal, woke, whatever you like to call them, often levelled at the poor, maligned millennials,

which is another term that's kind of become a bit of a term of abuse, isn't it, really? But I like the fact that in gaming, a snowflake is a character whose abilities are really rare and as unique as a snowflake because you know all snowflakes are unique so it might be the one good person in a very evil race in a game so i like the fact that it's retained that original sense of something good and pure and precious and unique rather than sort of being dragged down and becoming oh you're such a snowflake incidentally we i always read the reviews as do you of our podcast and we had a hilarious one the other day um they told us

off for being too woke that was the first thing and then they said uh suzy you are not french please can you drop that ridiculous fake heavy accent um and move on and then it said otherwise very well researched uh it kind of made me laugh so if we ever do a program on french i'm just gonna i'm gonna drop my your accent is impeccable we both do our best to speak proper french when we're trying and you speak excellent german look if you've got anything you want to say to us, do please get in touch. It's purple at somethingelse.com. And that's something without a G. And in fact, after the break, I think we've got quite a few letters that we need to go through. Oh, yeah.

Let's do that. I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President. And this is Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. We are a new show breaking down the anime news views and shows you care about each and every week i can't think of a better studio to bring something like this to life yeah i agree we're covering all the classics if i don't know a

lot about godzilla which i do but i'm trying to pretend that i don't hold it in and our current faves luffy must have his doune in every week for the latest anime updates and possibly a few debates. I remember, what was that? Say what you're gonna say and I'll circle back. You can listen to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect every Friday wherever you get your podcasts. And watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll

or the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. on Crunchyroll or the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. give yourself the ick. That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Welcome back to Something Rhymes with Purple, where we've been talking about the language of gaming, something that Giles and I are not, I would say, particularly au fait with, but personally, I find it absolutely fascinating and quite reassuring that it is so sick in, you know, neologisms, coinages or resurrections of old words that actually really mean a lot in that community and that it is so tightly knit.

I'm intrigued that you dare to use the phrase oh fay because it's a french phrase oh fay what does it mean i'm going to say oh fate now and then what does it mean a you new word f-a-i-t what does it mean with the fact i think it means that you've got you've grasped you've grasped the facts so a fit fact. So, if you don't like Susie's French accent, how right you are. She's not even French. How dare she? We've had lots of letters and we've had two emails recently from purple people bamboozled by a certain word. First up is John Jenkins from, well, Down Under. Hi, Susie and Giles. Can you help me with the origins of the word bamboozle? Anything I can find is fairly vague, and the origin seems to be uncertain or unknown. The word came up in a crossword group that I facilitate for blind and vision-impaired people.

Because we're in lockdown here in Victoria, and that is likely to be extended, I can't get to any library. So I'm hoping you can help. And I told the group yesterday that I would make every effort to find the origin of bamboozle. Many thanks, John Jenkins. Yes, you know, in Australia, I think they have this sort of Fortress Australia policy. And it's been marvellous at keeping the pandemic down there. Of course, the day will come when they have to open the doors and who knows what will happen. And clearly things are not good in Victoria.

But anyway, can you help him with his... I can. Well, it's kind of fittingly elusive, the origin of bamboozles, you know, for a word that means to be confounded and mystified or deceived. And it appeared really suddenly in print in around 1700 or the early 1700s. And it was mentioned in an article in the Tackler magazine, which is a British society magazine. And this article was written by Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver's Troubles, no less.

And he, as he often did, was decrying the, what he called, continual corruption of our English tongue. So he didn't like bamboozle and he didn't like other words like banter, sham, mob, bully, bubble, because he considered them to be just fashionable concoctions of the time and were never going to last and were just degrading to the language. But it did last despite Swift's efforts to kind of, you know, erase the word. Several theories you will find put forward. So there's a Scottish word, Bombays, or Scots word, Bombays, which has a similar meaning,

and that might be based on a Dutch word. There are links, it is said, with the Roma community, so with the Romani language. But there's a fascinating suggestion that it goes back to a really old French word. Here you go, embabouiner. Embabouiner means to make a baboon of somebody. Now, there's no connection that we can find that really strongly links bamboozle with any of those particular theories, but it's quite hard to resist that, you know, the idea of bamboozling somebody is making a monkey out of them. Well, listen to this from Phil and Ruth Martin. They've emailed to say that they were at the Lost Gardens of Heligan this morning and spotted loads of bamboo.

It led us to wonder whether there's a link between bamboo and the word bamboozle. What do you think of that? Yeah, I think any resemblance is probably entirely coincidental because bamboo, which is from a family called Bambusa, is possibly from Portuguese or Malay, I think. So not an English word, whereas bamboozle is either Scots or English from the start. So I think unlikely, but intriguing suggestion. You see, we can't always give a definitive answer. Another email from Australia has come. This time it's from Alison Smith in sunny northern New South Wales.

Hi, Susie and Giles and all the crew that bring perps to life. I've been doing some research on the pronunciation of often. Oh, yeah. Or often. After being pulled up on my misdemeanor of emphasising the T. I did, however, notice that Giles pronounced the T during the Swalk episode that was sealed with a loving kiss. So I would say often I do pronounce the T.

Often. What is correct, do you think? Often. To be honest, this research has left me more baffled than ever as there seems to be a lot of conjecture. Can you let me know what is correct? Alison wants to know whether it should be often or Can you let me know what is correct? Alison wants to know whether it should be often or often. What do you think is correct? I'm afraid I can't give you a correct

answer because we have been arguing this for absolutely centuries. So, first of all, oft is what it was really until the 16th century. So, we talked about oft or oftentimes, for example, oftentimes. And so often or often was used less commonly. And in the sort of pronunciation guides, I suppose, of the 16th and 17th centuries, gave a pronunciation with that middle T, the medial T, if you like, being pronounced. But others recorded a pronunciation without it. And even though Elizabeth I actually used the T, it then became wrong to, or not wrong, but apparently sort of impolite or a bit uncouth to put the T in the middle. So it was avoided by careful speakers in the 16th and 17th century. So you can see we have gone back and forth and back and forth and

back and forth. And today, the pronunciation with this T is often seen as what we call hypercorrection. So somebody trying too hard to sound formal, much as you might say, he gave the letter to Giles and myself, which of course myself, it should be just he gave the letter to Giles and me. But because Giles and me sounds quite slangy and informal, people put myself in as a kind of form of hypercorrection. So the answer, I'm so sorry to say, is that we have been going back and forth on this for a very long time. And really, you can use either. Or either. All right.

So let me take another word, soft and soften. Yes. That's oft and often. Maybe it should be without pronouncing the t i've always said because i i say soft but i don't say soften no i say soften i want to soften the hurt to you um how interesting i would have said often but maybe i was i think you might switch it depending on what what um syllables you have in your sentence and and um whether you're using consonants and vowels and things i think it might be interchangeableable. The truth is language is about communication, isn't it? And clarity of communication. And if it's more helpful to pronounce it and not to pronounce it, pronounce it.

If it isn't, it isn't. I agree. Okay, here we are. Oh my, Risa Korchuk has been in touch. What a great name, Korchuk. K-A-W-C-H-U-C-K. Hi, Susie and Giles. What is the origin of drag, as in drag queen?

My son came home from school today saying some people think it was an acronym from Shakespeare's time, standing for dressed resembling a girl. But we both doubted that explanation. Love the podcast. Risa rhymes with Lisa and Gareth in Calgary Canada we love Canada we love your name Risa and I think we should do a whole episode all about the world the drag scene chance for me to get out my slingbacks and put on a fancy frock so what is the what is the origin of drag well that is the traditional theory that it comes from the stage direction because until I think it was

Charles II decreed that women could actually perform on stage all female roles obviously were played by men um what the Oxford English Dictionary will tell you is that it probably refers simply to long dresses or petticoats dragging across the floor so that seems to be more likely I think there isn't solid evidence that it comes from dressed as a girl or dressed resembling a girl. But I agree with you. Let's do something. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. What a film.

What a film. Yeah. Look, if you've got a wordy question of any kind or just want to get in touch from, you know, we've had Canada, Australia. Everyone's been in touch. We even got an email the other day from Ponder's End. Anyway, wherever you are, please do communicate. It's purple at somethingelse.com. Susie, time for your trio. If you're up for it, thank you for staying awake, actually, during this podcast.

I've enjoyed it. It's woken me up. Well, I don't know about you, Giles, but we have been welcoming the sunshine back to parts of Britain, but it's not universal. So I know that my father down in the southwest is enjoying an absolutely swallowing day, as in really sweltering and beautiful. Whereas here, it is actually quite cloudy, but it has at least replaced the rain. May for us in Britain was absolutely characterised by rain. And I think Florida is probably quite similar, because I tweeted a word that I love from English dialect for when it's bucking down, coming down in stair rods,

and that's plothering. It's really plothering out there, which actually goes back to a dialect word for mud, but I like that one. So that's my first. The second, not normally associated with sunshine, but possibly with raining cats and dogs, woofits. Woofits are an unwell feeling or a slight sort of moody depression.

Oh, I've got a slight touch of the woofits. Yes, all woofits, you could say. And is it woo from woe, feeling a bit sad, a fit of woe? It could well be. So many of these brilliant terms, if you remember, there's the marbled fumbles as well from centuries ago and there's feeling probably mobbly as well they all sound so friendly but actually they describe a real sort of onset of melancholy um so i'm not sure of the origin of that one like so many dialect words it's quite hard to find out um so that's my second and the

third one is just you know english does insults so well this one just came to mind quite recently not looking at you jars i promise a princock and a princock is a conceited fool oh what a princock is he that sounds like a word from the well oh do you think it does i was gonna say a bit later um you know restoration i'm gonna look. Oh, what a princock. You give us your poem. I'm going to say it's 1670s. Look it up. 1540. Not far off.

1640? 1540. Oh, I'm way off. You were right. It was Shakespearean. That's Shakespearean time. What are Shakespeare's dates? Oh, good grief.

I don't know. You give me Shakespeare's dates because I'm about to get them off. 1564 to 1616. Okay, cool. I mean, it's fundamental. He does mention a princox in Romeo and Juliet because I'm brown. 1564 to 1616. Okay. I mean, it's fundamental. He does mention a Prynne Cox in Robie and Juliet. I know that. Oh, well done. Game, set and match as ever to the brilliant Susie Dent. She is wonderful. And I love all those words. I particularly like woofits. The French for woofits would be,

I suppose, ennui. Is that a word you'd like to say to us? Say the word ennui. Should I say it in a really nice way? I'll, ennui. Is that a word you'd like to say to us? Say the word ennui. Should I say it in a really nice way? I'll say ennui. No, it's ennui. And she says it beautifully. Your French accent, frankly, is delightful and un peu sexy, even if lexicographers are not the sexy profession. When you speak French, it is. Okay, I've got a poem for you. It's a change of mood completely. Somebody, Martin Hesford, who is a script writer, and I was praising a film that he wrote, that I saw about the artist Ellis Lowry.

And the film's called Mrs. Lowry and Son. And I saw it and it starred Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall, and I thought it was wonderful. And I think I'd seen his work earlier. He wrote a TV show called Fantabulosa, which was a celebration of Kenneth Williams that starred Michael Sheen. Anyway, I've praised this man's work. And he very generously sent me a copy of his poems, just published. It's his first collection of poems.

It's called Lilac White. And here is a short poem from it. I need to run sometimes. Rip the sky open. Taste the fear. I need to jump. I need to fall. fall, laugh, cut myself, love myself, close my eyes, see the silver world, eat the lilac flower, and breathe. Oh, I love that. I'm going to ask you for a copy of that. I absolutely love that. Very beautiful. They're marvellous poems, and he just takes a handful of words

and the way he lays them out on the page, it is fantastic. Yes. So what a treat. What a nice, interesting episode. I've been outside my comfort zone in the world of video games. Well, I think we both were,

but it's just, it's nice to have a glimpse and then, as always, invite the purple people to tell us, you know, that the ones, and there are so many who are far more knowledgeable than us in so many of these areas, to share their words and their stories from these particular areas. So please do get in touch, as Giles said, at purple at somethingelse.com. And as always, Something Rhymes with Purple is a Something Else production. It was produced by Lawrence Bassett with additional production from Harriet Wells, Steve Ackerman, Ella McLeod, Jay Beale and, well, no Princock he.

No, more of a speed bump. Golly.